Absolutely amazing, incredible, thank you
‘THESPIAN” is an odd word, it doesn’t exactly have one meaning and it doesn’t exactly have two. It’s usually a mock-pompous way of saying “actor”, but it can also mean everyone in the theatre world.
I told you I sneaked into theatre’s Naledi Awards and was impressed. Multiply impressed: that they exist, in a time of shrinking; why they exist, Dawn Lindberg sinking bulldog teeth into hanging on; how they work, encompassing thespians whose names aren’t on the programme.
I’m intrigued to realise that in youth I wouldn’t have said this; I’d have said it’s actors who make theatre, for the other guys it’s just a job. Seeing a wrinkly grey fellow applaud an award for the chap who constructs the set, I’d have mumbled words relating to flatulence. I’d suspect he was acting lovey-dovey to all mankind while inwardly feeling that true theatre talent was being devalued.
Well, wrinkly and grey now, with the accompanying improved mental eyesight, I see that (a) I was an uptight little prig and (b) the world moves on.
I wasn’t a solitary little uptight prig. We all were, or most. That was our times, we put important people on pedestals and bypassed the little guy.
The Naledis showed you needn’t be in footlights and make-up to score the recognition of your theatre peers; you can get it for putting class and vigour into nailing up the curtains. Cheers, technical co-ordinator Bra Haccious Mokopakgosi.
Idly, I wondered if there’d one day be a Best Doorman prize? Could I perhaps work up a joke around that? Well, no. Before the night ended it wasn’t a joke, I had a nominee.
I was in a corner seat and my doorman – she’d klap me if I said doorwoman, doorperson, doortron – became my Professor of Thespianism, pre- dicting winners in whispers and expostulating in graphic Sesotho when the judges erred, sending them telepathic advice that strikingly included an accusation of “political selection” when Afrikaner Andre Odendaal was passed over for Best Actor.
Here’s betting on Best Doormanship coming up in the 2020s. Here’s betting, too, on a Best Satirist in the making. Young Capetonian Daniel Richards played five diverse Cape characters/ caricatures in Pay Back the Curry, discussing current affairs and skewering another USAS (Unmentionable South African Sensitivity) in every sentence.
The trooping of the colours, 31 winners coming up and saying thanks, made its obligatory contribution to the overwork of those innocent words Absolutely, Amazing and Incredible. A churl, if anyone knows where to find such a person, might even quibble that Thanks itself was overdone, especially towards the judges, as if their choices were made by favouritism.
But much of the thanks was far from rote, as in resounding thanks to parents or mom or ouma for what I realised en route was a special thespian thing – not just for material sacrifice, but something subtler, for accepting their child preferring stage-world to the saner working hours and pay packets that office or factory might have offered.
Thespian humour, too. Director Dawn has 22 staples in her head and more breakages than a dropped china cup after a 3m fall (right in front of her grandchildren!) MCs Thumi Morake and Alan Committie worry that she misread theatre’s good-luck wish “break a leg”. Actor Erik Holm comes up for his courage award, for coping with the world after breaking his neck.
Thespians, doorman Lebo included, here’s to a grand (half) year of generating the next Naledis.